Growing up in Texas, Nicole was passionate about football, waking up in the middle of the night to watch European football.
She studied chemistry at Texas Tech, then spent years working in healthcare technology. By her own account, she was good at it. One afternoon in 2014, she was writing code for a hospital with a Champions League match playing on a second screen. She looked at the screen.
I realised that I would rather be on the touchline.
A search led her to the Football Industries MBA (FIMBA) - the only programme of its kind in the world. She applied. That was essentially it.
Nicole arrived in Liverpool in 2016 with a clear sense of what she did not want to spend her career doing. What she found was a full management education built around the business of football: finance, law, governance, marketing, strategy, operations - and a global cohort of people who had grown up inside the sport.
Guest speakers, club visits and career sessions helped her see where her existing skills mapped onto real industry need. A conversation with Paul Barber at Brighton & Hove Albion FC was one of the first times someone articulated to her that fan engagement and data-led thinking were becoming genuine club priorities. She filed that away.
After graduating, she returned home and joined the U.S. Soccer Federation. Over the years that followed, she held director-level roles across player development, academy operations, referee education and event marketing. Her work placed her at the centre of the development pathway that has shaped the men's game.
At one point, I realised I had touched almost every area of soccer in America," she says. "When you look at the men's national team, 7 to 9 of the 11 players on that roster came from the academy system that I managed.
Among the players who've played in this World Cup is Gio Reyna, who scored the USA's fourth goal against Paraguay in a 4-1 opening win - the finish at the end of a 26-pass move. Nicole has known Gio since his academy days at NYCFC. Below is a photograph of the two of them from that period: relaxed, familiar, laughing. It is the kind of image that carries more weight now than it did when it was taken.
.jpg)
Nicole left U.S. Soccer in 2022 and joined MGC Sports, where she is now EVP, Football and a certified NFL agent. On the surface, it reads as a pivot away from the sport she crossed the Atlantic to study. In practice, it is a continuation of the same work. The negotiations she conducts, the regulations she navigates, the commercial relationships she manages - all of it runs through what she built in Liverpool.
Little tidbits that I do in negotiations - I think back to the negotiating exercise that we did in our football and law classes. That is really what allowed me to separate myself from other people who want to work in the industry.
FIMBA has also become part of how she is introduced professionally.
One of my boss's favourite things to say about me is, 'Did you know Nicole did a soccer MBA in Europe, in Liverpool?' Most people are like, 'Wait, that exists?'
For the first time in a decade, Nicole has been watching her national team play as a fan. After years spent inside the development system, working the events, running the operations, she can sit with a drink and watch the World Cup without thinking about work. She helped build part of what is happening on those pitches. Now she gets to experience it from the outside.
Physically, I might be missing it," she says. "But spiritually, emotionally, all the work that I put in is bringing these games to life.
Earlier in her career, she had a moment that stopped her in a different way. She was working as a team liaison officer for Nigeria during a match against the women's national team in Austin, Texas. Standing on the touchline, she sang both national anthems - one for the country she grew up in, one for her parents' country.
"I'm not an emotional person. But that was one of the first times where I went, wow. I definitely made it."
She did not, in her wildest dreams, expect to be where she is.
"It's FIMBA that has gotten me here."
Learn more about Nicole's story here.
Interested in studying with us? Learn more here.